


You've got the Right of Way

by monanotlisa



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Bisexuality, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Canon Related, Character Study, Epistolary Elements, Espionage Tropes, F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Female Protagonist, Femslash, Gen, Interracial Relationship, Mentor/Protégé
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 23:58:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3466838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monanotlisa/pseuds/monanotlisa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy Carter put the <i>bomb</i> in <i>bombshell</i>, but it took Maria a while to figure it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've got the Right of Way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tielan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/gifts).



::

When Maria Hill first entered S.H.I.E.L.D., Peggy Carter had left its roster decades ago. There was her framed photo on the Directors Wall in the Triskelion, at the very edge of a long row of men. But Maria didn’t believe that dim part of the past meant much in light of her own bright future.

::

History was on her radar, of course. Maria excelled at the subject at the Academy, as she excelled at most of them; never mind that B- in Non-Proliferation in Global Relations. Abstract history was a red thread running through her class modules: The History of Conflict, Intelligence & War, Espionage in International Order. 

It wasn’t until Maria was knee-deep in her first case, briskly going over the mission background one night in the Triskelion library, that she took note. _Notes_ , too many of them. No way for her to make the available intel track, and it was only fifteen hours until the final debrief. Understanding that keeping her as a junior field agent in the dark could’ve been purposeful, or at least a calculated risk, was not the same as wanting to thus go into the field. Rationally, Maria understood her path to Top Brass didn’t hinge upon her first mission. And yet.

She hit the buttons. _Captain, The file seems to be missing intel._  
The cursor blinked the way Hand sometimes did in person too. _Agent Hill, You may peruse the sources S.H.I.E.L.D. has had to the fullest extent. I am expecting you ready and prepared at 1000 sharp._

What Maria thought was the jackpot of cleared data was just line after line of densely spaced words. Her mother’s family meant she was fluent in Spanish, and Maria's Malay had gotten good enough to read the Harian Metro. But these scanned pages were in German. The key words of the terse summary report were, “S.S.R.,” “explosive,” and, again and again, “Agent Carter.” 

Peggy Carter had been in Germany during the Second World War; it stood to reason she'd had either caught or later on interrogated Brandt, whose small chemical company on the Ruhr had supposedly found the Secret Grail of detonation agents, its formula changing hands across two generations and one ocean. 

If Maria had been Comms, she could have dug even deeper into existing if fragmented files to retrieve ancillary information, then analyzing the data. If she had been SciTech, she could have looked at the potential explosives themselves: how to counteract their volatile nature; how to create physical or chemical safeguards for herself and her team doing recon in the suspected facilities tomorrow. But her job was to get as full and clear a view of the situation as possible, and act on it. Thankfully, the unlocked files held crucial information, and for the rest, there were S.H.I.E.L.D databases. The Vic Seal of Approval did get Maria access to an STE.

At the third ring over the secure line, a woman answered, “Good evening, who is speaking?” Crisp consonants getting straight to the point.

Maria’s mouth was dry, but she swallowed once and went on without a hitch. “This is Junior Agent Hill. Am I talking to Former Director Carter?”

“This is Peggy. Is there a situation at the Triskelion?” Carter did not sound old or fragile at all. She sounded alarmed.

“No, Director.” Maria steeled herself and proceeded to brief Peggy-Carter-herself about her old case featuring explosives with their origin in Germany in 1944, carefully exempting the recent case elements. When she finished, she was prepared for a variety of reactions.

What came through her receiver, though, was laughter. “Maria. _Agent_. This is a bit unusual, as you may have gathered from my reaction. I do not believe I have received a S.H.I.E.L.D. call for counsel on a War case in the last twenty years.”

Not that surprising given that Carter was in her eighties by now, and WWII long over, but then again, “Maybe it wasn’t necessary.”

“I should think a S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy Ops graduate would know better than that.” No harshness in her voice; Peggy Carter sounded perfectly pleasant. Amused, even. “I will be glad to tell you what I recall; you are quite in luck given that the past appears to be clearer to me than the present these days. But you have to promise me something, Agent Hill.”

“Anything, Director.” Anything she was allowed to promise, at least; Maria was not willing to break the rules for even one of the most decorated retirees S.H.I.E.L.D had. Then again, Carter would know better than that.

“Get back to me. Not to share classified intelligence. Just your intelligence.”

:: 

And for a good year, Maria did. 

It wasn’t always easy to obtain authorization from her superiors to phone Former Director Peggy Carter in her D.C. home, existing infrastructure notwithstanding. But it also wasn’t hard as such. Field Superior Officer Blake once noted how very useful Carter’s decryption skills would be for text messaging. Maria wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not. Field Superior Officer Paulson wasn’t so deadpan; he grinned while scribbling her a note on a post-it as if it were a hall pass, and said, “Building your Old Ladies’ network, Hill? I recommend finding slightly more up-to-date mentors.”

Maria didn’t say, _I don’t see you volunteering_. She said, “Thank you, sir.”

But even beyond administrative issues, there were -- others. in March, a Rat interrogation went spectacularly sideways. Maria had to clasp her hands together in front of her for two days to stop her hands from trembling. And yet she still wasn’t trembling as badly as Carter’s voice. Maria didn’t like that one bit, but she liked what Carter said, then:

_Come see me at my place, Maria._

Armed with the address and her lucky boots, Maria drove to Alexandria at 1700. Peggy Carter lived in a mansion half-hidden behind a hedge and a row of gnarly trees. Although the property was nestled into a lush neighborhood, the aerial view of her house had shown Maria that there was a small, winding gravel road at its back, connecting neatly with a major thoroughfare. Once a spy, always a spy. 

A man opened the door; behind him the voice Maria knew in her sleep by by now rang out, “Gabe, I told you, I can get it.” He chuckled, reached out to her. “Agent Hill, please come in. Peggy’s being sensible, but I cling to not being de-commissioned yet. Welcome to our home.” 

Warm Southern vowels washed over Maria, and she could feel her shoulders relax a little. Shaking his hand firmly and stepping forward, she understood their earlier exchange: There was a metal walker behind Former Specialist Gabe Jones that he grasped onto immediately, taking small, shuffling steps down the hallway with it. Maria had seen photos of him, read up on his Howling Commando victories and his return to S.H.I.E.L.D. as an agent in the fifties. Even now, stooped and moving with difficulty, it was easy to see he’d been tall and strong once, and his smile was still luminous. 

In the den, Carter rose from her armchair by the fireplace, silver-haired and straight-backed. Maria was struck by two things, though: One, Peggy Carter was easily a foot shorter than Maria had pictured her in her head; two, she was not doing well.

Maria accepted the tea offered, and sat down on the sofa across from Carter with more hesitation than she’d wanted to display. Carter moved slowly but with a measure of elegance that had always eluded Maria, who’d been the tall and gangly girl on the playground; it had only been track-and-field and, later, triathlons that gave her better body control.

“Well. How have you been, Maria?”

“Fine, Director Carter.” Maria had composed a short briefing on recent developments in her head on the drive from Theodore Roosevelt Island to Alexandria. But, she didn’t want want to say her prepared piece, she realized. She wanted to say the truth: “Or maybe I’m not. The mission went to hell.”

Carter’s brown eyes were warm. “You don’t have to tell me the details. But if you like, and absolutely only then, you can tell me why you are so rattled.”

Maria dropped her elbows on her knees and focused on the teacup before her -- bone china. Its translucent surface was calm. Then she told Carter about being in the interrogation room with a smirking, properly secured prisoner, going through various techniques -- authority and power play, false replay, the nobody-cares approach. All of which turned out to be useless, so her eager teammate asked to give it a try...only to have his throat torn out by the guy’s teeth: He had sauntered in to sit on the table’s edge, leaned in, gotten in the prisoner’s face. (Maria would never forget the pulsing fountain of red streaming out of Anil’s neck, the way his body crumbled.) 

Carter listened, slowly shaking her head at the end. “This is horrifying.”

Yes, but -- “You have seen much worse.” Carter had, by all accounts, never been anything but perfectly put together. Grace under fire, in addition to the courage. 

“Perhaps, but they also took their toll.” Carter pursed her lips, still painted in a dark red, but there was a tiny smudge at the corner, now that Maria was looking closer. The lines around her mouth deepened. “One morning, waking up near Smolensk, I literally couldn’t talk. Not English, not German, not Russian. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, you understand; there was just nothing I could do to make the words come out. This incident didn’t following a particularly gruesome day; in fact it was finally a peaceful trek. Another time, my ears kept ringing for days so I couldn’t hear, couldn’t sleep. There had been no noise during the liberation mission.”

Right. “It all came back, I assume.”

“Yes. But not always automatically.” Carter seemed to want to say something else, but faltered. Her face went a little slack. 

Maria leaned forward, alarmed. “Director?”

Her head snapped up. “Yes. Maria. I want to give you something. It is important.” She stood almost abruptly, and with brisk steps walked into the next room, presumably her study. Dark wood panels crammed full of books and a wide window with a desk in front of it, facing the darkening garden outside. Very District of Columbia by way of London, England. 

Peggy stopped, made a sweeping gesture. “These are the letters I wrote to Angie.” 

Sun-yellow and red shoe boxes in pin-check patterns with ribbons, stacked precariously on the side of the desk. It was taking some effort on part of Maria to not reach out and move them so they weren’t in danger of toppling off the edge, down onto the Cairo rug.

“Her grandson sent them over; he wrote his thesis on women’s epistolary relationships in the 1960s.” Peggy’s eyes trailed the dusky sky sky outside, but Maria thought she was not seeing much. “I could not imagine outliving her for the longest time. Angie was always so full of life.”

Maria’s slight sense of dissonance faded: Of course these shoe boxes crammed full of letters that Peggy Carter wrote to her actress friend in Los Angeles belonged to that friend. 

“My sympathies.” Maria remembered reading about Angie Martinelli and the friendship the women sustained not just in New York during the 1950s as well as later, Martinelli conquering the B-list of Hollywood and Peggy relocating to D.C. She had not paid it much mind. The woman was far removed from the world Maria inhabited...or so she’d thought. Clearly she’d thought wrong.

“I realize you may have the clearance, or be able to obtain it, to go into the actual details of my S.H.I.E.L.D. cases, as we have done so far. But I am afraid this cooperation is coming to an end.” Maria saw a glittering sheen in Peggy’s eyes, but it was gone in the blink of an eye. “Excuse me, Maria.”

Something strong squeezed her ribcage. “Nothing to excuse, Peggy.” She ran a hand through her hair. A part of her wanted to read the letters, learn it all; the rest wanted nothing to do with sentimentalities. “Aren’t these personal?”

“They are, but that’s why I want you to have them. You may not need them now.” Peggy’s eyes flashed. “But they may help you out later.”

It was only later, weeks later, that Maria learned of Peggy Carter’s diagnosis. And of course, it was only years later that Maria understood what Peggy had meant by her last sentence. 

::

Maria did not read all letters at once, and she did skip the passages in the letters that spoke of love, sex, and desire. Maria was not even sensitive to Peggy wanting to keep her romance with Angie during their New York days in Howard Stark’s apartment private (though she would have been had Peggy asked her to). Those parts just weren’t pertinent.

(And her attitude, Maria suspected, was why Peggy didn’t even ask.)

::

Madripoor was when it changed for Maria. 

Contemporary Security Issues and Strategic South Asia had been one thing; being in the ancient haven of pirates and thrumming hub of all businesses legal and illegal was another. The latest S.H.I.E.L.D. location was overlooking Buccaneer’s Bay, but Maria had made sure her place was close enough to Lowtown and the Princess Bar to keep an ear on the ground. She could always wash the side of her face, and her hair, in under a minute.

Her handling of the affair got her the President’s commendation, cheers in the Triskelion, and clammy handshakes all over Capitol Hill. Maria treasured Alexander Pierce giving her his best golden-boy smile. 

But Madripoor also gave her a reputation. Her performance evaluations before had always lauded Maria’s work and character both, praising her ability to take orders and proceed stringently to resolve a situation, noting her leadership and quick decision-making. Now, suddenly, superiors hedged their bets on her, bumped her ratings down, or at least added explicit exemptions. “Overly eager to discipline junior field agents,” one of the reviews said. “May need to rein herself in for a more supportive, team-oriented mission approach.” Or, completely honest but certainly not found in Nick Fury’s evaluation, “Brusque to the point of alienation.”

One of the yellow shoeboxes held what Maria sought. She flipped open folded page on the desk before her.

_That producer fellow sounds like a problem. Remember my deceased yet loathsome colleague, Ray, from the telephone place? He told me to smile, frequently so. If possible, ignore these requests from men, but of course it is not always possible. Just remember that they feel such need to put you down only to make themselves feel better. Remember that you holding your head high was precisely what rankled that man. Hold it higher, Angie._

_And perhaps invest in a sharp fork._

The last part never failed to cheer Maria up. And she never dropped her chin even one inch.

:: 

The New York S.H.I.E.L.D Office was not exactly a party location, but it was true that the agents in the City prided themselves on being somewhat more social than their D.C. and West Coast counterparts. 

For measures of “social.”

Maria was only in NYC temporarily; she did believe in connecting with her fellow agents (which was why she was here on this minimalist rooftop with the rest of them, looking at the lights on 5th Avenue in the first place) but she didn’t bring a lot of clothing (which was why she was in the only dressy separates taken along: black pants and a sleek black top). 

“Hey, Hill,” O’Connor said, his cheeks a little flushed. True, he didn’t have to use her title, but his address didn’t exactly fill Maria with confidence about the next words out of his mouth, “Sorry to see you didn’t get the memo. _Semiformal_. Or did you get it and just didn’t like it? No dress for you?”

Maria lifted her tumbler to her lips and took a slow sip of the Macallan. “No dress for you, O’Connor.” 

The red in his cheeks deepened, his eyes narrowing, and for a moment Maria felt her shoulders tense. But all he did was speak, leaning in conspiratorially. “I’m just saying, between us, might be good for you. Would make you seem --” he swallows _prettier_ or some word to that effect, “-- seem more approachable.”

“I’m already more than satisfied with my approachability.” She swirled the whisky in her glass and caught sight of a familiar wiry figure in a sea-green cocktail dress: Melinda May. Maria facial expression must have said it all, because May was at her side in what felt like a second. 

“Maria. Good to see you.” Said without much inflection, but May’s lips twitched knowingly. “Phil and I were just talking about you. Excuse me, Commander O’Connor, may I borrow Commander Hill for a moment?”

Needless to say she could. 

Back home, Maria carefully opened one of the red boxes and lifted the photo up to the light of her halogen lamp. The paper was yellowed, but its edges were crisp and sharp still. Peggy Carter was in her early thirties here, attending a ball, a gala; she was wearing a sparkling gown that accentuated her figure, and lipstick that contrasted her pale face. Peggy was looking square into the camera. The curve of her lip was amiable enough, but she did not smile.

The photo was black and white. But that was probably the only thing there was. Maria put it back into the box and slept well that night. 

::

_Angie, You are of course right; we will always find friends, and I have been more than blessed in that regard. But it is one thing to have someone to have a quick drink at the pub with, and another to talk in your own four walls over apple pie and schnapps. I do look at these male colleagues of mine, and how they clap each other’s shoulders and laugh and discuss Nationals games but fall silent when I enter the room. And I know that this is a facade for them, too: If they hold on to symbols they won’t need to face that they are different, in competency, in interests, in color or creed. And I look at my fellow women agents who want to play the men’s game: Angie, I do not think it is wise to join, but wisdom and I haven’t always been great bedfellows, have we?_

Maria absently noted the coffee stain, her own smudged fingerprint on that page. This was less the strident Peggy Carter everyone knew. It was definitely the Peggy Carter Angie Martinelli knew. Maria, too, thought she had an inkling by now. 

In her white-tiled bathroom, the mirror was silent. It did not judge, not even when Maria leaned so close that her breath fogged up the glass, and she could, on her temple, make out the one white hair she’d had since puberty. 

Deputy Director Hill.

In the Academy, out in the field, short hair had always served her well. It was easy and useful, and she was and had always been attractive. 

But she’d had short hair for so long. There was no need to keep it long should she not like it, and clips and scrunchies were available everywhere. 

She could always wear it in a bun or a ponytail.

::

When they brought Captain America back, Maria did not agree with Fury’s recommendation for S.H.I.E.L.D’s “Blast from the Past” setup -- how he would be startled, fragile, a relic; this wounded hero from the last, worst war the planet had seen. 

The man Peggy had mentioned changing her life, the man in her letters, had been stubborn and fierce. Based on history that half the nation seemed to conveniently forget, he had also been more than a bit of a renegade...much like Peggy herself. To try putting that kind of person, effectively, on ice again seemed like a terrible idea to Maria. Steve Rogers would be easier to bring in line with full disclosure, she thought. 

Or, disclosure to the fullest extent possible.

So when she met him, she was frank with him. “Captain. I know the world looks different, but you’ll see some things don’t change underneath the surface. Go scratch it. You don’t need coddling.”

Steve Rogers eyed her carefully, leaning against the doorjamb of his apartment. He was wearing only a tank top and loose-fitting corduroys; his hair was a little unruly today and not the coiffed side-part from the old photos. Yes, his physique was impressive, but that wasn’t it. It was the slow half-smile that held almost no joy. “If you believe S.H.I.E.L.D. is taking its name too literal when it comes to me, what would you have me do instead?”

“Take a trip to D.C. when you find the chance. There’s someone you’ll want to see.” His eyes were blue like hers, electric all of a sudden. “But you won’t thank me for it.”

“So why are you telling me, Deputy Director?”

She could have given him a lot of answers, and Peggy Carter featured in most of them. So ultimately, it was pretty simple. “Intelligence.”

Rogers' real smile was a spark traveling up her spine. Maria clasped her hands behind her back, but, what the hell. She smiled back.


End file.
